If there was no meme-stockery happening, Gamestop would have gone bust and everyone that works there would have been laid off. That's what the whole short strategy was intended to do, bleed them dry just like Toys R Us.
In a crazy way this is probably saving a lot more jobs than it's jeopardizing.
Why would GameStop have gone bust? Even if GameStop stock would trade at zero, the company still exists until it runs out of money and declares bankruptcy, which is independent of its stock price.
In this case, it's not really saving any jobs, since GameStop employees (excluding higher ranked employees) probably don't have any part of their compensation that's stock based.
Toys R Us was a leveraged buyout, which is definitely a much more ethically dubious strategy, and that can cause jobs to be lost. This won't cause any jobs at GameStop to be lost, although there probably will be some unhappy traders and people left holding bags of GameStop stock.
Out of curiosity, has that actually happened to a public stock? I'd assume the minority shareholders would have standing for a lawsuit if someone were to do a hostile takeover of a stock and liquidate the assets of the company.
Afaik it used to be popular in the 70s and 80s. It’s sometimes called “Corporate Raid” [0]. In the movie Wall Street, Gordon Gecko wants to buy the airline to sell it for parts.
You're right, what I meant is that the share price doesn't affect the finances of the company (eg. a company that sells widgets makes the same amount of money whether their stock is worth $1 or $100000). As you point out, the share price should in theory reflect the value of the company (bankrupt company -> share price of $0), but a fluctuating stock price doesn't really change the value of the company itself (excluding shares that it owns, obviously).
In a crazy way this is probably saving a lot more jobs than it's jeopardizing.